Saturday, May 01, 2010

BBC skews discussion on Iraqi Jewish archive

A trunkful of documents sent to Washington for restoration (National Archives)

With thanks: Niran

Millions of listeners to the BBC's World Service must have fallen off their chairs to hear Dia Kashi, an outspoken Iraqi Muslim, reveal that Jews have had a rich history in the region since Babylonian times. Baghdad was once a third Jewish, he said, and the Jews helped modernise Iraq. Funny that - so the Jews are not all colonisers and Khazar converts from Europe.

But BBC presenter Lyse Doucet, in her ignorance, seemed to think that the only possessions that the Jews left behind in Iraqi were their artefacts, Torah scrolls and marriage records. It fell to Dia to make clear that the Jews, who, he emphasised, were forced to leave Iraq, were also forced to leave all their property behind.

But, as we have sadly come to expect from al-Beeb, the ensuing discussion, about whether the Jewish archive rescued in 2003 from the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein's secret police headquarters and taken for restoration to Washington should be returned to Iraq (documented here, here,here and here on Point of No Return) - was skewed. Pitted against the Iraqi ambassador to Washington, pleading that the Jewish archive was Iraq's heritage, was Dov Zakheim, a member of the US administration. Zakheim made the curious point that digitisation of holy books was not the answer, as observant Jews would not use the internet on Shabbat!

The argument turned not on whether the archive rightfully belonged to the Jews of Iraq, but whether the US interim government had the right to remove it. "Wasn't that stealing?" Ms Doucet almost shrieked. There was nobody there to put the argument that if anyone has been stealing, it is the Iraqi authorities.

Absent from the discussion was a representative of the Jews of Iraq themselves, who, it was furtively admitted, almost all live in Israel.

You can hear the item for the next seven days on BBC Newshour (the report starts 44 minutes into the programme). Here is the segment.

According to this blog article, Zakheim clearly indicated that the archives belong to the Iraqi Jews.

Dov. S. Zakheim, a senior Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration, is opposed to sending the materials back to Iraq. "I have no sympathy for a government which stole it from the rightful owners and then a successor government saying it belongs to them," he said.

Eliyahu you are right - in print Dov Zakheim's message was unequivocal, but on the BBC programme he was forced on to the back foot into defending the actions of the US interim government under Paul Bremer.

Follow by Email

Click picture for Facebook page

Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)